Perhaps I am wrong, and the collapse is already in progress, as some seem to think, but if it is, it is an incomplete one. What I suspect will happen is that populations will lose faith in their fiat currencies to the point where they refuse to accept them as reward for services rendered or as payment for goods purchased.
Let’s face it, the lack of criminal proceedings brought against bankers who have laundered drug money and fiddled exchange rates etc. for their own personal gain can only mean that the governments are on their side, especially in the U.K. Not only that, but also we have all had to witness these same bankers reward themselves with seven figure bonuses for failing so badly that they had to be bailed out at our expense. How long before people declare that ‘enough is enough’?
There is more: with so many people doing two, three, or even more, jobs in order to make ends meet, and then being offered worthless little pieces of cotton reinforced paper as payment for their labour, how long will it be before there is a mood of revolution in the air and people refuse to work for effectively nothing? I imagine that a break from working all the hours God sends would be very attractive in its own right.
The problem for society at large is that these people do work that, despite the pittance that it usually attracts, is actually important, unlike that of so many others, such as advertising executives, bankers, film actors etc. etc. etc. Once the shelves don’t get stacked because the shelf stackers have stopped shelf stacking, or the delivery driver has declined to deliver the goods destined for those self-same shelves, it will not be long before we see a real collapse, i.e. one that you can get your teeth into.
How long before energy supply workers join in the fun and the lights go out? Think of all those lovely computers at the trading desks not even capable of low frequency trading let alone the high frequency stuff they were purchased for so that they could rob our pension funds little by little! How long before the water supply dries up, and with it the ability to cook a meal or flush the toilet? Of course, these are only minor inconveniences. It goes without saying that the collapse will only really go into top gear when we can no longer buy a Starbucks coffee.
There is an upside to all of this, believe it or not. There are grounds for arguing that climate change is now set upon a course where there are so many positive feedbacks now in operation that the only way we can hope to provide a chance for our descendants to survive is for there to be a complete economic collapse, with all that that implies; see Nature Bats Last http://guymcpherson.com/2013/01/climate-change-summary-and-update/